Benjamin West's Altar Paintings for St. Marylebone Church

Abstract

Several recent studies have been devoted to important aspects of the English career of Benjamin West. West was, it is now realized, a remarkably innovative artist whose ventures into multiple subject matters and stylistic modes produced a number of milestones in Neoclassicism and proto-Romanticism. But equally noteworthy was the sheer vastness of West's pictorial output. In view of the number of his works and of the volumes of extant pertinent documentary and critical evidence, the modern examination of West is still in its formative stages.